POST ELECTION 2012 - And Then There's Florida

"Presidential Election 2012: Florida as embarrassing afterthought" by Daniel Tilson, Examiner.com 11/7/2012

Forty-nine out of fifty states have officially weighed in on the 2012 American presidential race, with President Obama having won 303 electoral votes so far, and a second term as our nation's 44th president.

And then there's Florida.

Currently, somewhere around 98% of the state's votes have been counted, and according to the Department of State Division of Elections, here's the vote count as of about 11:00PM on November 7th, 24 hours or so after Obama was declared the winner of the national general election:

Obama / Biden: 4,161,864 votes = 49.88%

Romney / Ryan: 4,110,272 votes = 49.26%

While clear just how surprisingly unneeded the FL votes turned out to be in securing President Obama's reelection, it remains unclear when final Sunshine State results will be ready. At the worst, we're looking at November 20th, the deadline for counting U.S. Military overseas ballots.

But it's not those military ballots that are creating the current vote counting problem. For the most part, it's not poor performance by County Elections Supervisors or their staffs either.

No, what has once again made Florida's electoral system the object of national ridicule and the punchline of choice for jokes about compromised voting rights is the carefully calculated plan developed and implemented by the Republican Party of Florida (RPOF), the plan to suppress traditionally Democratic votes in sufficient numbers to win a razor-close election - just like this one.

The simple truth is that over the past two years, the RPOF's legislative "super-majority" elected in 2010 spent a disgraceful amount of taxpayer time focused on forcing through various voter suppression initiatives - two of which combined to create this mess.

First, they cut the Early Voting period by nearly half, from 14 days down to 8. All these early voting days were well known to GOP strategists as important driving forces for Black & Hispanic voter turnout in high-density urban areas, like Miami.

Republican Governor Rick Scott sided with his party's legislative leaders in claiming the move was intended to cut down on the possibility of voter fraud - even though the verifiable fact of the matter is, voter fraud perpetrated by individuals at local voting sites is extremely rare.

Then, that RPOF legislative super-majority pushed eleven convoluted amendments onto the 2012 ballot. Most originated not with them, but with the Tea Party. The addition of those amendments created a long and winding monster mash mess of a ballot - a ballot that was daunting, discouraging, and time-consuming to comprehend, much less to complete.

And so, as they say, A + B = C...sort of. Those tactics succeeded in making it harder for many South Florida Black and Hispanic voters in particular to cast their votes. But then...the law of unintended consequences kicked in. Those voters started channeling the Twisted Sister classic song, "We're Not Gonna Take It".

They remained undaunted. They refused to be discouraged. Instead, they waited up to 7 hours to vote and took the time it took to complete the crazily overblown ballots. They waited from the early evening until the wee hours of the following morning to vote.

Then a group of County Supervisors of Elections jumped on the bandwagon of Participatory Democracy in action. They pulled an end-around play on Governor Scott, who had refused pleas to extend Early Voting into the Sunday and Monday immediately preceding Election Day. With a growing groundswell of constituents crying out to exercise their voting rights, the Elections Supervisors decided to do their job, by letting people request Absentee Ballots on the spot and vote on those two extra days. Many, many citizens seized that opportunity.

So what was the sum result of this head-on collision between partisan political manipulation, and gritty grassroots determination? In nine different Florida counties, so many thousands of extra Absentee Ballots flooded in over the final days that the system was overwhelmed. Elections office workers have been working tirelessly to get all the ballots counted, and they will.

But make no mistake here. This situation is is not the fault of those workers or of the Elections Supervisors. It is the result of a premeditated Republican Party of Florida voter suppression plan designed to interfere with Floridians' voting rights. While it succeeded in turning the presidential vote tabulation and reporting process into a nightmare, it also succeeded in revealing the ultra-partisan priorities and poor sportsmanship of the state's leading GOP legislators, and the governor.

Perhaps that law of unintended consequences will continue to have consequences for these same elected officials, right up until Election 2014.

The bottom line here is that regardless of our political differences, we Floridians deserve a productive and public-spirited Florida legislature, ruled by fair play, not dirty tricks - a state government that we can be proud of, rather than embarrassed by.